How did ancient civilizations get the engineering knowledge required to build impressive structures?
In: Engineering
I think people start with the idea we are smarter today than 4000 years ago which just is not the case. We collectively have more knowledge, but problem solving skills are just as good in 2024 as in 2500 BCE
People like Albert Einstein and Leonardo a Da Vinci existed, there is no reason to believe that some ridiculous genius that thought of all these methods as they were going along didn’t exist at the time.
Also understand that piling rocks on top of each other isn’t exactly high tech.
A great saying I heard not too long ago: anybody can build a bridge that holds up. It takes an engineer to build a bridge that *barely* holds up.
The Great Pyramid could at best be built in 9 months with known technology at the time
Surviorship bias. You only know about the ones that were massively overbuilt and survived into modern times. The rest of them fell down long ago.
Mostly trial and error. Keep in mind we’re only seeing the ancient structures that are still standing. There undoubtedly would’ve been countless structures that collapsed or deteriorated and were disassembled. They would’ve started off with small structures and followed the concepts of the structures that lasted on larger and larger skills. Over time they developed/learned geometry which would’ve made it easier to design these structures with some understanding of what sort of strength they had.
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